The Top Ten Films of 2010

Posted by Christian Chung

7 years ago

Certain titles showed up on virtually every top-ten list turned in by the staff members of FilmCritic.com. Inception. Black Swan. The Social Network. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. While it’s unlikely 2010 will be remembered as a great year for cinema, Hollywood produced a handful of instant classics that did resonate with us and truly could be considered special. Below is a collective top ten, formed after all of our individual top-ten lists were tallied. You’ll find those lists at the bottom of this feature. So without further adieu, here are FilmCritic.com’s ten favorite films from 2010.

Is the tormented U.S. marshal (Leonardo DiCaprio) tracking a missing patient around a desolate New England island or clawing away at his own psychological demons? That fevered debate, left open for discussion, fuels Martin Scorsese’s visceral genre exercise, which our critic called an “ominous, claustrophobic, and at times confusing endurance test that audiences no doubt will want to take.”

Noah Baumbach’s caustic character study about a weirdly charismatic
misanthrope is both brutal and brutally funny, featuring a career-best
performance from Ben Stiller as the title character. (“He has never been
this instinctual and yet inscrutably complex,” said our critic.) Greenberg is hard to like but easy to understand, and his relationship with a naïve assistant played by Greta
Gerwig offers one of the year’s most unexpectedly moving romances.

Widely
known as the movie where James Franco hacks off his own appendage, 127
Hours lands on our year-end list for the myriad ways that
whizbang Oscar winner Danny Boyle and his admirably flawed leading man
make the claustrophobic true-life tale of climber Aron Ralston a
compelling, compassionate, imaginative, and inspirational story of
resiliency and triumph. As our critic wrote about 127 Hours,
“Once you’ve witnessed it, it’s impossible to dismiss.”

Pixar puts Andy’s beloved toys away for good but not before taking audiences of all ages on another nostalgic,
witty, and flat-out funny Toy Story adventure. The preschool predicament of Buzz (Tim Allen) and Woody (Tom Hanks) — itself a spoof of Hollywood’s
prison-movie genre — may have too closely mirrored Toy Story 2
for some critics. But it was director Lee Unkrich’s courageous
inclusion of a near-death experience that placed the perfect cap on Pixar’s Toy Story
series with a sequel that “is light-years ahead of its competition.”

Instead of subverting a
traditional genre (their specialty), the Coen brothers make a “straight-ahead Western, an old-fashioned, classically told cowboy movie,
and a darned good one,” according to our critic. What doesn’t change,
however, is the Coens’ commitment to quality, from Carter Burwell’s
majestic score and Roger Deakins’s breathtaking cinematography to the
spot-on performances by the entire ensemble.

Darren Aronofsky isn’t always interested in the goals that drive his obsessive characters. He’s more fascinated with whether or not they can endure the strain of the journey. Nina Sayers, Natalie Portman’s
ballerina in the director’s mesmerizing Black Swan,
appears to crumble under the pressures of her dance. But in doing so she and Aronofsky have created a riveting artistic expression that, our critic says, “descends, rapidly, into madness but thrills every toe-shod step of the way.”

Almost every critic on our staff clicked the Like button for David Fincher’s Social
Network, which detailed with razor-sharp wit and keen intelligence
how Harvard loner Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) birthed Facebook
from a broken heart. As our critic wrote, comparisons between Fincher’s Network
and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane are “innumerable,” as this
prescient contemporary drama captures our generation’s need for both
social connectivity and technological isolation.

Were
we dreaming? Better question: did we ever emerge from the dream? Not
since The Matrix has a movie so completely immersed audiences in
an alternate sci-fi reality somewhere between reality
and reality-bending imagination. Christopher Nolan’s mind-warping Inception
“is a new cinematic idea and a fresh story that is executed with a
precision and energy rarely dreamed of in Hollywood,” according to our
critic. It’s also the best movie of 2010, as determined by the
FilmCritic.com staff.